I think we often forget just how many American Indians have died due to one cause or another since Europeans have settled here. Like the reading pointed out, we have no sense of American Indians as agents in the struggle between themselves and Europeans. We have a vague idea that they were there, they were doing things, and then they were gone. The tribes are never presented to us as making choices of equal importance to what Europeans were doing. I think it comes from the idea that we already know the ending to the story. The American Indians, to a certain extent, lose. They're overwhelmed and pushed out.
The Western view of history is one fraught with the idea of historical inevitability. We assume that events occurred the way they did to lead us to where we are right now. Thus, we can marginalize the agency of American Indians because what happened to them was what had to occur. We need to give that up. As long as we consider it conscionable to think this way, we can never deal with what happened in our collective past. And if we never work to understand the past, we cheat ourselves of the chance of crafting a better future.
1/24/09
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